Why I Read Two Books Together (that might not agree)

Clearly, it takes more than a single big idea to change the world. As Scott Berkun has put it, “Big thoughts are fun to romanticize, but it’s many small insights coming together that bring big ideas into the world. - Greg Satell in Mapping Innovation

This is one of the biggest reasons I love Mapping Innovations and have come back to reread it several different times. Once I realized how the point of the book worked in my understanding of my unique CliftonStrengths it got even more important.

@thoughtcatalog via unsplash

I also believe in reading things I might not agree with. Doing this helps me understand differing viewpoints. It also helps me understand how we get to where we are. Learning from others who are attempting to find out the same thing but have starting and ending points that differ from my own beliefs and foundations is one of the best ways to actually build up a healthy and informed view of what I believe, not just what I don’t believe.

You see, I have to be reaching out far. To make myself feel energized (#Strengths), to feel productive, and to feel like I am fulfilling my call. I need to be spending a portion of my day, week, month, and year trying to think about the bleeding edge of things. This means chasing down ideas, following footnotes I find in books, and beginning to draw together things that are somewhat related in an attempt to think through things and hopefully bring some sort of new thought into fruition. And to do this I don’t want to just be reading books written by other pastors and Christian thinkers. I want to see why and what and how these ideas are intersecting popular culture and how influence is changing.

That’s me.

The quandary
How do I read books that have nothing to do with Jesus? OK. That might be a little intense. But why is a Christian pastor routinely reading as much, if not more, of writing that isn’t from a religious perspective? Especially about deep things.

The answer

I try to always have a companion book going. Especially when I realize I am learning significantly from the non-Jesus book. But I think you can adapt this in other ways. If you have a pretty significant thought about something, one that is foundational, reading things that are outside of that belief system is a healthy thing. This is an academic thought, a spiritual one, or anything else. I think having two different books to understand similar though patterns, especially one that is spiritual really helps. The “Jesus Book” (as I often call it) isn’t there as some sort of fortress to help me not descend into some space of paganism. What I have found it does is helps me actually learn from the book that I might disagree with from a larger perspective by keeping my mind in a back and forth.

The Case Study
Over the last year I have been really interested in mental health, neuroplasticity, and formation. And the idea of neuroplasticity has now crept down from complicated biology and neuroscience, and into instagram reels that help you not eat that 3rd Oreo. So I’ve collected quite the stack of books on the subject, both secular and “Jesus Books”.

The past month I read two of them side by side. The first was the book The Other Half of Church by Jim Wilder. It went into the idea of the brain’s role in discipleship and community formation. I highly recommend it (and have send it to multiple folks). The other book I read with it was How to Do the Work by Dr. Nicole LePera. It is a book about self-healing and what it means to begin the internal work of brain rewiring. I was really enjoying both of them side by side. One night at dinner a friend of mine who works in community advocacy and is one of my regular conversations about Christianity and Mental Health and I were talking and I mentioned How to Do the Work. This person in a moment of shock (and interest) gave me more of a background into the authors personal life.

Let’s just say there are some fundamental assumptions we don’t share.

But this didn’t cause me to quit reading the book. It did help me understand some of what they were talking about. I didn’t write off many of the good things I had learned (both personally and as part of my larger interest). What is interesting is knowing that point of difference allowed me to put a waypoint in my notes about LePera’s book and then attach it to a completely different thread I am researching and reading about. This is where Satell’s whole idea in Mapping Innovation of different pieces of information intersecting and building off of each other finds its strongest point. I wouldn’t have seen a jump off point about this other research project inside of my reading on neuroplasticity and faith development.

So read things you might not agree with. And read books in tandem.

How much do you engage with things you don’t agree with? Let me know in the comments.